Advantage out

There is, first, the collateral benefit. With Australia citing security to pull out of their Davis Cup tie in Chennai next month, India get a walkover. But sport and public engagements are seldom about the final result alone, and the circumstances in which this development came demands deeper scrutiny. As with almost every international tournament, the Australian tennis squad were assured of more than adequate security detail. Many of the players may also know of the Chennai Open, part of the ATP World Tour and in which their compatriots have competed. But Chennai's tennis sensibilities are not relevant to John Fitzgerald, Australia's Davis Cup coach; he instead asks: "Did the IPL move for no reason?"

Sports administrators are not expected to be conversant with the nuances of geopolitics, and so Fitzgerald's ludicrous and flawed argument that a recent train hijack in Jharkhand has a bearing on his boys' security in Chennai can be easily countered. It would, in fact, have been laughed away, had that IPL poser not come. As this newspaper pointed out at the time of Lalit Modi's brash and megalomaniacal move to take one of India's domestic tournament overseas, the parameters in which that development was articulated were bound to have serious repercussions. It was deemed sport's equivalent of high treason, not least because it cast reservations on India's suitability as a venue for sport, reservations that did not adhere to reality. The IPL is such an outright commercial enterprise that there is a tendency to take too seriously its easily alterable contractual obligations. But consider the outrage that would have met a similar move to take overseas, say, a Ranji season, just because it did not suit the cricket administrators to negotiate scheduling for some reason. But the BCCI did not want to go into those scheduling nuances anyway; it suited them to convey this as a development aimed at keeping cricketers and cricket matches safe. The fact that Fitzgerald can ask the question he does shows how successful the BCCI has been in misrepresenting facts.

The onus, then, was and is on the government to make its case better and more convincingly. Because this is not about the IPL; it's about the branding of India as a secure destination.